"It was deeply, deeply strategic."
I let the corner of my mouth go. Just the corner. He saw it and his grin widened.
"So is she your girlfriend already?"
That one landed sideways. I had not braced for it. The word girlfriend in his mouth sounded too small for what was sitting in my chest, and too right at the same time.
"Not yet?"
It came out a question. I heard it come out a question. My own face tightened at the sound of it.
Mikhail laughed.
"Idiot. Why not? You want someone else to take that seat?"
"Hell no." It was out before he finished the sentence. He nodded once, satisfied, like a man who had set a trap and watched it spring. I made myself slow down. I made myself give him the honest version. "I have not found the right time."
"She waited for you a long time, brother." He was not teasing now. His voice had gone to the place it went when he meant a thing. "She deserves a label."
I did not answer. I did not need to. He let the silence sit, and after a minute he stood, brushed the cold off the back of his coat, and walked back toward the house without making me say it.
I stayed on the bench. The pewter sky moved. A single dark bird crossed it.
I knew what I was going to do. I knew when. I knew how. I would finish what we had started in the holding room. I would let Ivan finish what he had started with the phone. And then, before the night turned over again, I was going to find the woman who had walked into a meeting of three Sorokin brothers and laid a traitor on the table like a deck of cards, and I was going to give her the word she had already earned twice over.
The cold air in the garden tasted different now that I had decided.
20
CHLOE
Lily's text was a single line. Come to my room. Bring nothing. Bring yourself.
I read it twice over my mug in the kitchen, set the mug down, and went.
The compound at this hour had its own quiet. The big west windows were going apricot in the late autumn light. Two of Alek's men stood at the end of the corridor with their hands folded, and they both pretended not to see me when I passed. It still warmed the back of my neck.
Lily's door was open a crack. I pushed it with two fingers.
She sat cross-legged on her bed in a cream silk robe, two glasses of something pale on the side table and a stiff little paper bag tucked beside her knee. Tissue paper fanned out of the top. Her hair was loose. Her mouth was already curving before I made it all the way in.
"Close the door," she said.
I closed the door.
"Sit."
I sat. The mattress was deep enough to feel like a hand catching me.
"I have a gift for you," she said, and pushed the bag into my lap with both palms.
"For what?"
"For being you. And for a small operational reason. Open it."
I parted the tissue. The first thing my fingers met was lace, and under the lace something cooler and heavier. Silk. Deep wine red, almost black in the folds. I drew it out one piece at a time. A little bralette with thin ribbon ties at the shoulders, lace cups, silk band. Panties to match, ribbon ties at the hips. Over the top, a sheer robe in the same wine silk, long sleeves, a sash you could pull with one finger.
I held the bralette up by its ribbons and felt my face go hot.
